a place to share verses that encourage, challenge and inspire

beside springs of water

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend an inspiring conference. For the past thirty-five years, my family has been connected with Heartbeat, a non-profit educational organization. Heartbeat provides “springs of living water” to those who are seeking a meaningful life.

What makes Heartbeat unique is that “while there are millions of Christian communicators and teachers speaking to Christians, there are very few who have repeatedly focused on communicating with those who are outside of the Christian community.” Heartbeat uses language that connects with those who are searching for life.

The theme of the conference was “What Really Matters”. One thing that matters to Heartbeat is being relevant to young adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine. Several men and women in this age group spoke, and it was startling to see the disconnection between church and the reality of their world. Please check out Heartbeat.org and consider how you can connect in a deeper way with “those outside the Christian community”.

One Response

While a high percentage of Americans will say that they believe in God, more than half of that population would report experiencing from mild to severe allergic reactions to religious language and religious organizations.

Heartbeat, for more than thirty years, has been successfully translating the inner essence of Jesus’ message into the context of everyday life. Instead of triggering an allergic reaction and rejection, Heartbeat’s approach had been repeatedly met with wholehearted acceptance.

Immune to Truth But Not Religion:

The history of Christianity is the history of Jesus’ original intent (providing stimulus so powerful that is evokes in people the wholehearted response of loving God, neighbor and self) being subverted by thousands of variations — distractions, endless controversies, doctrinal disputes…hypocrisy and exclusivism — generation after generation.

As a result of these subversions of Jesus’ intent, the average churchgoer has often been, in strange ways, inoculated against the truth of Jesus’ core message.

One of the most common results of this inoculation is the confusion that exists between the perception of the map and the territory. Typically through sermons, Bible classes, etc., religious people pour over the map — they see places like Love of God, Love of Neighbor, and Love of Self, and after hearing about these places, year after year, they eventually begin to think they have actually made the journey when in reality, they have only really run their fingers over those places on their well-worn maps.

It is a very paradoxical situation — this business of people being so inundated with religion that they become immune to the power of the message for the larger world. Jesus confronted the same problem in his day. He understood that he had to change the very forms of how people were thinking. He understood that he had to teach them how to see, how to listen, how to learn. He had to shock them, to create abruptions — sudden interruptions — in their usual ways of thinking, if the truth was ever to get through. His parables are a good example of this approach to teaching. He understood that just telling people to love God, neighbor and self would not get the job done. His approach was to provide what were, to his audiences, shocks to the system, powerful stimuli to which the response was the appearance in the world of a group of people who loved God, who loved their neighbors, who would die for one another, who were so filled with love that they would endure any burden to share the very good and joyous news of life transformed.